Dame Gillian Beer: Wrapped up in books

It comes as an endearing surprise to hear one of the star speakers at last week's sell-out Virginia Woolf conference in London admit she was at first baffled by the author. One doesn't expect Dame Gillian Beer, former head of a Cambridge college and in demand as a lecturer on both sides of the Atlantic, to be baffled by anything, but then she doesn't need to put on airs to impress interviewers, or anyone else. She can point to a string of books that have built her an academic reputation in literature (George Eliot, Woolf) and in the field where literature meets science, a field she has helped to open up to the scholarly plough.

At 69, her enthusiasms are undimmed - for new novels, for her hero Charles Darwin, and indeed for Virginia Woolf. "I'm happy when I read her and write about her. I go to her when I feel won't it be wonderful just to renew." That wasn't always the case. "As an undergraduate, I was completely baffled when I tried to read To the Lighthouse. Now I'm amazed I couldn't find my way into it, but I just didn't get it."

She later rediscovered Woolf at a summer school in the US, reading The Waves, on the face of it a difficult book. "As we read it, they and I began to get quite absorbed as it yielded more and more about the way people live without replicating what they do."

Last week she was talking to the Woolf faithful at their annual conference - a mixture of more than 300 academics and fans - on the author's wartime experiences. In Three Guineas, written in 1938 on the verge of war, she gave an angry and radical response to the problem of how to bring about peace, an attack on the militaristic upbringing of boys that shocked and annoyed many of her contemporaries.

Now Woolf has triumphed, she says, although she adds, wryly: "People's assumptions take much longer to change than their opinions. We don't know what assumptions we are harbouring even if we have correct opinions."

In a sense, Beer embodies the triumph of Woolf's challenge to the male establishment, which crushed women's aspirations to write and be educated, as set out in A Room of One's Own: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," in Woolf's much-quoted sentence.

Brought up in distinctly modest circumstances by her mother, Beer has worked hard for the room of her own and the space to write (though in her case it has not been fiction since the age of 14, when she finished her first and last novel). It still appals her that her mother was compelled to resign as a teacher for the London county council when she married.

She says the small ratio of women professors at Cambridge is worrying, but feels Alison Richard, as vice-chancellor, will make a difference. "The balance has changed in the time I have worked there enormously. But the architecture doesn't shift. The colleges look the way they always have done but what goes on inside may have changed or may not. Different colleges have different traditions."

Feminist progress does not, in her view, need separation. Girton College, where she was a fellow for nearly 30 years, was right to go mixed in the 1970s, to widen access by better links with comprehensive schools and with British Asians, and to be less preoccupied with gender, she feels. Clare Hall, where she was president for seven years until 2001, she describes as a "riposte" to traditional Cambridge college life: families are welcome, there are children at supper and no high table, so everybody can meet everybody else.

And as the mother of three sons - her husband, John, is a fellow academic - she has always tried to reassure women that they will not sink into a stupor just because they have children. (As one of her Girton students once re called in Education Guardian, "We had good role models such as Dame Gillian Beer, who was wonderfully successful at combining career and family.") She herself had to go on teaching because there was no maternity leave.

"One shouldn't imagine one becomes intellectually inactive when one has small children. In my experience, having these children and bringing them up changed my work fundamentally. I became interested in fantasy."

Victorian fantasy led her to Darwin, who was to have a big impact personally and professionally. "Evolution has done with me - I'm free! I've borne the next generation. It sounds absurd but it was a tremendous release.

She became interested in how writers related to the society around them and still finds it "extraordinary" that Darwin was able to think against the grain and then express his own theory so persuasively. "How do you have new ideas? Language is so historical and communal." She is also fascinated by how ideas that seem incredible at first become in time easy enough to be taught in school.

Science history is now fashionable, but it wasn't in 1983, when she published Darwin's Plots, the book that made her name. Science is focused on new discoveries, but her book went against the current to consider its past and to look at interesting failures as well as successes. She is now an important figure in that science/ humanities interface that has sparked a lot of scholarship as well as popular histories, such as Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men. How seriously do scientists take all this?

"The problem of interdisciplinary work is the question of competence," Beer says. "I don't consider myself competent to work with absolutely current molecular biology. But I am interested in the reception and assimilation and resistance to ideas going out into the scientific community and for that one needs a length of time."

In her next book, Alice in Space, which she intends to finish in the autumn, Beer looks at how Lewis Carroll played with new ideas in non-Euclidian geometry - the never-ending party, time running backwards - although as a mathematician he remained in the Euclid camp. "I'm having enormous fun. I've always loved Through the Looking Glass, although I was scared by Wonderland as a child."

The book after that, Experimental Islands, seems to be causing her more angst and indeed has been in the works for years. It is about the importance of islands in Victorian thought and literature: Treasure Island, Coral Island and the Island of Dr Moreau, of course, but also her beloved Darwin. Not only were the Galapagos a ready-made laboratory for his theory, but his realisation that islands off south America had been part of the landmass in the distant past was a vital prelude to his revolutionary ideas, she believes.

No one would ever compare the warm and amusing Beer to the desiccated Dr Casaubon in Middlemarch who cannot finish his magnum opus, but her conscience seems to be pricking her about her islands book. And that is the name she reaches for when defending her hero over his 20-year delay in publishing his Origin of Species. "I don't think he was like Casaubon, eaten up by his own research. He realised he had to work in every domain. It was no good if his theory just worked in botany or zoology, and it had to work all over the world.

"Once I'm doing the writing, I enjoy it; a rhythm springs up in my head. But getting myself to do it ... there is always a good reason to do something else, filling the washing machine or writing a reference. I sometimes think I do it for the 20 minutes of euphoria when I finish the book."

Is the euphoria punctured by bad reviews? Not since Darwin's Plots, she says, which got one "absolutely vicious" one in the New York Review of Books, dismissing her book as of no interest to anyone except a few literary theorists. But she had the last laugh with the success of the book among historians and anthropologists.

She starts to say she is hardened to bad notices but checks herself and puts her equinamity down to not having published anything recently. Behind the confident exterior, one feels, someone as open to new books and experiences as Beer is always liable to be hurt.

She's an "impassioned" reader of new novels and poetry, a judge for the Booker (twice) and the Orange prizes, experiences that have left some jaded. "Some people say they stop enjoying novels after 50, but I love that feeling of starting a new novel and not knowing where it's going."

She thrives on discussion as well as lecturing and loved the "long seminar" of the Booker judging. "We did have strong arguments but there wasn't a falling out. There isn't the bitching one hears about. I enjoyed the process of reading, but it was quite taxing to enter so many people's mind worlds. Novels are often so intense even if they are not successful. The intensity of the experience quite usurps you."

She notes how many authors have trouble with the last third of a book, sometimes, she believes, because they are simply running out of money to live on. ("A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.") "People forget that writing a novel is an enormous undertaking in terms of commitment. I've never managed it myself." Or at least not since she was 14.

Still, as she says with a smile, Mary Wesley was in her 70s when she started her novels, so who knows?